ss ignorance

There's a tiny space between remembering and forgetting in which you live. It's where he chooses to keep you; not so close so as to actually want you, but not so far away so as to actually need you. You don't live within time, you supersede it, existing somewhere else - in un-time? - and he knows that is where he exists for you, too. At any moment, you can both recall an ideal - remember perfection - and that is perfection, in itself.

But you don't know what he's become.

Maybe you remember languid nights spent reading outside on the deck beneath the stars. You'd fall asleep there, you and he, only waking with the rising sun, and you'd laugh to yourselves as you made your way inside. Now, when he's not overcome by insomnia, he sleeps with a fan on because he can't stand the silence, otherwise. And he tosses and turns all night, fighting demons in his sleep.

Maybe you remember him writing into the wee hours of the morning, ablaze with the white-hot heat of inspiration, pulling page after page out of his old Underwood. Nothing could stop the flow of creativity, then. Now, he sits for hours in front of a computer screen doing nothing and calling it research. Or he flips through his old manuscripts trying to capture just a simple glimpse of that past inspiration. Or he reads, once more, the definition of a novel hoping, maybe, that he's just missing something.

Maybe you remember a lad who was satisfied with himself and his surroundings - satisfied to live a small town life. Content with the simplicity of spending the afternoon drinking coffee and reading books in a downtown café, he could waste hours there and not think twice. Now he fears he could waste a lifetime in the city, wrapped up in stimulus, enveloped by society, drowned by expectations.

But he doesn't know what you've become, and he finds solace in that. He keeps afloat on this sea of uncertainty in a ship built of innocence. But he can't see the outside of the hull on which is stamped: SS Ignorance.